ANALYSIS: UK Games Market's Top 5 Brands

In this new regular segment with insight from leading stat-trackers, Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch reveals the Top Five best-selling video games brands in the UK...

Chart-Track is proud to announce the development of Brand Analysis as part of our CUBE data warehouse solution.

We’ve looked at all games sold from 1996 to the present day to work out the Top 30 brands. This week, we’re starting with the all-time Top Five.

FIFA is the overall winner both for units and revenue. It is also the only brand within the Top Five from outside the games industry.

The brand’s Title Count includes two PC compilations – therefore the total number of actual FIFA games (including management titles) is 34, ever since the first to launch in the UK (FIFA International Soccer on Mega Drive, December 1993).

The first FIFA game to count from launch sales was FIFA Soccer ’96, which is the third in the series. The top seller is the latest release , FIFA 12 which took £96m in sales.

Mario is No.2 in units and No.3 by revenue. The huge title count of 70 includes every Mario game all the way back to Super Mario Bros on the NES in May 1987. The top seller is 2008’s Mario Kart Wii with 3.65m units – it recently overtook Dr Kawashima on DS as the biggest selling single format title in the UK.

Call of Duty is No.3 in unit sales and No.2 by revenue – pretty impressive when you consider it first appeared on PC in November 2003. There have been eight major instalments but Game of the Year editions, expansions, and handheld titles bring this up to 17. The top seller in the UK is 2010’s Black Ops (£155m). The PS3 and 360 games account for 85 per cent of retail sales for the entire series.

The Sims – No.4 in units, No.5 by revenue – first appeared for PC in 2000, then on console in 2003. The lengthy Title Count is of course due to the many expansions.

Five of the all-time Top 10 PC best-sellers in the UK are Sims-related. The Sims 2 is the current best-seller and the only boxed PC game in the UK to shift over 1m units. Only 61 per cent of series’ sales revenues generated by PC/Mac.

Grand Theft Auto first appeared in December 1997. The 18 iterations counted includes Double and Triple Packs, and two versions of GTA IV. But it is still 2004’s GTA: San Andreas on PS2 that is the best-selling entry and ranks as the third biggest individual product ever in the UK by revenue (£86m)– rising to £96m when adding in the Xbox and PC versions.

BRAND ANALYSIS

Title Count shows the number of iterations of each game all the way back to the late ‘80s. Only sales since 1996 are included.

This analysis is up to and including week ending February 11th, 2012. Some brands will already have added to their Title Count (e.g FIFA Street, Uncharted, UFC, Syndicate).

Brands can be companies, characters, a series and so on. FIFA and Mario are both brands, despite one being licensed and a company and the other an original IP.

A MARKET OF TWO HALVES

How many titles account for 50 per cent of all UK entertainment software units and revenue in each month?

This is an example of some powerful analysis that can be done via Chart-Track’s online data manipulation tool and listing major new releases for each month is easily done.

Participating retailers can overlay their own particular sales to see if they under or over-perform on this scale.

As you might expect, September, October and November reveal some interesting stats on this subject.

Six titles accounted for 50 per cent of all unit sales in November 2011 but, as with September 2011, just three titles accounted for 50 per cent of all revenue.

In the chart (left), new releases by month are stacked top to bottom, with the biggest seller at the top.

Multi-format titles are counted as one product for this example, but this could easily be set up as an individual SKU count.

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